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It's all still just words. No two humans could ever fully agree on what constitutes "harm", racist ones would even debate who is "human". It's like everybody h
by PavlovsCat 13y ago
It's all still just words. No two humans could ever fully agree on what constitutes "harm", racist ones would even debate who is "human".
It's like everybody has the public methods what_is_harm() and what_is_a_human(), but how they're implemented matters, not the function signature. The laws of robots are just placeholders for something that never got written.
Words are tricky. What if robots decide that the best way to avoid harm coming to humans is to prevent any being born? So that means you have to rephrase it, into something like maximizing human happiness. Oh no, now they're injecting everyone with drugs and cloning humans by the planetfull. What now? Actual source or it didn't happen.. just creating an empty file called solution_to_the_problem.txt doesn't work, I tried it.
- timdev2 13y ago> Words are tricky. Words are relatively easy. Ethics are not reducible to lexicography.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoThat's why trying to reduce ethics to a few words is.. tricky. > Ethics are not reducible to lexicography. Nor is anything else, which was kind of my whole point.
- philwelch 13y agoThere are robot stories by Asimov that explore a lot of these questions. The Three Laws were a basis for storytelling more than anything.
- jodrellblank 13y agoThey are placeholders to something written several billion times over in various ways in every human brain. We don't learn ethics by reading it as a dry description; why do we expect to build other minds that do?
- n09n 13y agoBecause that would be consistent with how those minds "learn" everything else they "know".